Best and worst Bay Area pumpkin patches

Every year, around this time, I get really pissed off at a pumpkin patch.

It’s impossible not to get a cute picture of two kids in a wheelbarrow.

Not the pumpkins specifically, but the corn maze attached to the Petaluma Pumpkin Patch and Amazing Corn Maze (prepare yourselves for the ear-piercing Web site music). Most of my side of the family lives in the Santa Rosa/Healdburg area, and this ill-placed corn maze — visible from Highway 101 as you drive by — seems to cause rubbernecker-driven gridlock traffic during most of the month of October. (You’d think people had never seen corn before. Or a maze. Jesus, there was one on every Burger King placemat I had when growing up. Foot on the gas, people!)

In part because it’s in the perfect location to meet my sister, brother-in-law and parents, I found myself last Sunday headed to this unholy land of squash and maize. But mostly I wanted to see what the big freaking deal was, that’s worth turning a nice isolated country drive into the Bay Bridge Toll Plaza during rush hour for a month each year. Are there Hannah Montana tickets scattered across the floor of the corn maze? Is Rick Springfield playing a free concert every morning? Do they pay you to take the pumpkins?

Pretty close. The traffic problems aside, the Petaluma Pumpkin Patch and Amazing Corn Maze is an awesome place to meet your last-minute Halloween needs. It’s cheap, clean and has tons of stuff to entertain kids of all ages. We never entered the corn maze, and still killed a good hour climbing on a hay pyramid, rolling the kids around in wheelbarrows and playing in the small city of jumpy houses. The staff was really nice, and we got two carvable pumpkins and five decorative gourds for $10.

If you build it, they will gridlock.

My anger has definitely shifted away from the owners of the patch and toward the motorists. I still think the place should be closed down, but it’s probably the best pumpkin patch I’ve ever been to.

Good pumpkin patches and Christmas tree lots provide great opportunities to maximize your family time. Sure you can grab pumpkins at Safeway and a tree at that lot under the freeway overpass, but that’s 1. Cheating; and 2. A missed opportunity for some serious quality parenting points. We used to go to Half Moon Bay every year for our Christmas tree, and I remember those trips almost as much as Christmas itself.

This Christmas, like Christmases past, we’ll drive with our son from Oakland across the San Mateo Bridge, through Half Moon Bay and then head south on Highway 1. Miles later, just when we’re sure we missed the destination, we always find this awesome place that has inexpensive trees, free cocoa and lots of woodsy-looking dudes who will help you tie the tree to your car.

A-Mazingly annoying, but can we do better?

Finding a good pumpkin patch has been a little bit more difficult. Half Moon Bay has a ton of good ones, but we’re looking for something different than our Christmas tradition. We went to Ardenwood Farms in Fremont last year — which has a corn maze of its own — but we felt the pumpkins were overpriced, the place was crowded and there wasn’t much stock to choose from.

That leaves us with Petaluma, which is almost worth putting up with — even if it means CalTrans has to install metering lights between Rohnert Park and Novato every year.